Quick Hitters

I. German Philosophers
Proximally, factical Dasein is in the with-world, which is discovered in an average way.

II. Enchiladas
James reasons thus with respect to suppertime:
1) I'd like to have a ham and cheese sandwich with spicy mustard cut into triangles. This is the best option.
2) My favorite side-food to a ham and cheese sandwich is a pickle, because it's spicy.
3) There is no way that I will ever eat an enchilada, because it might be spicy.

III. Ironing Shirts
Having a closet full of neatly ironed shirts is quite gratifying. It's similarly gratifying to pull on a shirt that's been perfectly pressed and folded neatly on its hangar. But do you know what the problem is? I have to wear a shirt every day, and I usually make it a point to change shirts between days. This means seven shirts a week, and I'm not sure that keeping up with the ironing is worth the gratification of the neat closet and the sharp collars. I need some sort of additional incentive if this is going to last.

IV. Bells Up
I'm still waiting for the magic pill of trumpet playing. Somewhere out there is a mouthpiece that magically extends my range an octave in both directions, plays without fatigue for hours on end, and carries the power of a supersonic jet encased in velvet. Likewise, there's a straight mute on a shelf in some music store that plays pianissimos as delicate as a spider-web and fortissimos as cutting as a diamond-tipped drill bit. All of my "magic pills" so far, however, have had results like "sounds louder but makes your low register super flat," or "the intonation is better on that one, but what happened to your high range?" Practicing in the bottom level of the Civic Center this morning, however, I did find a very nice magic pill. When I lift my bell up out of my stand and hold my trumpet level, it sounds better. There's no way that I could have possibly known this before, because my graduate school teacher reminded me of the concept continuously for two years straight and wrote it out in big capital letters on a piece of paper that he told me to hang up in whatever room I practiced in for the forseeable future, and insisted that whatever the legacy of his instruction to me might be, he hoped that at least people would be able to say "Well, he fixed his horn angle."

That was a judicious use of $80,000.

V. Recently Reading
Just finished A.N. Wilson's biography of Tolstoy, currently slowly working through the MCLE collection on Existentialism. Through Kierkegaard, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Hesse, Heidegger, and Marcel, I'm feeling distinctly anti-German. Maybe you have to read it in the original to appreciate it? I miss Thomas Merton.